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Perhaps a separate list of books for "Game Designers" rather than developers would be helpful?

- A Theory of Fun http://theoryoffun.com/ (Raph Koster's blog is also excellent: http://www.raphkoster.com/ )

- Level Up! http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047068867X...

- Game Design Theory http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466554207

- Game Design Workshop http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9780240809748

I'd add: - Rules of Play http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/rules-play - Challenges for Game Designers http://books.google.com/books/about/Challenges_for_Game_Desi... - The Art of Game Design http://artofgamedesign.com/

> Perhaps a separate list of books for "Game Designers" rather than developers would be helpful?

I contend that the difference is rapidly shrinking except in the superbloat of AAA studios. The sort of person who is going to read this list strikes me as much more likely to be an indie developer.

(That said, I've read all those books you mention and they're fantastic.)

I would put "The Art of Game Design" at the front of the bookshelf of anyone that does game design work: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Game-Design-lenses/dp/01236949.... To me, this is the most valuable book I have on my bookshelf. Every time I pick it up, I scarcely read more than a few pages before I'm setting the book down to make a bunch of notes for new ideas I've had. The book is truly outstanding and practical, and will help give you a framework for figuring out what you want our game to be.

I've been developing games independently now for several years. Easily the most difficult part is the design. Merely implementing the game-- if only that was my biggest challenge!

You're right to point out that this list is targeted towards game engine programmers and not people who want to make games in general, but really, "characterization, storytelling, linguistics and spoken construction, cultural dynamics, psychology, sociology, history" are important skills for turning generic shootemups into generic Hollywood blockbusters, not interesting games. There are a lot of elements that come together in a good game, and I'd rank 'quality of writing' far at the bottom of an ordered list of them. Aspiring game developers should be playing through the NES canon long before reading that of Shakespeare, so that they can learn to produce interesting games with unique challenges and experiences, rather than slop to intersperse segments of their Hollywood-dropout fanfiction-quality storytelling.

I sometimes rewatch movies for the sole reason that I like their soundtracks and think the visuals fit them well. I would never suggest that sound is the most important element of film, or respond to a novice looking for direction in their career as a film director by waxing lyrical about music theory. You can fit an excellent soundtrack into a terrible movie just as well as you can stick one into a terrible game (try Verytex[1] for the Sega Genesis sometime), and neither ceases to be a failure of a production when you do so.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KfPM8xJWgM

> Aspiring game developers should be playing through the NES canon

Sure, but, dude. These are books we're talking about. Playing games is a given, to the point where if you're not, just go away.

The humanities, as I listed, are extremely valuable because they, too, show where we as people, not merely we as gamers, have been before--the tools we have developed that are put in the part of your toolbox for making people feel. Calling what it produces "fanfiction-quality" is silly and shortsighted and you're clearly wiser than that.

Story in games is like story in a porno--sure, it's nice to have and expected to be there, but if people were there for something other than the intended purpose they wouldn't be watching porn.

Devs (especially those playing at a level where they want books, as opposed to being jaded and just smashing more Unity/UnrealScript together) are better served by understanding software development and tools than by messing around with that other crap.

You can always backport story onto a game, add fluff, whatever, but if your core mechanics aren't tight and your code doesn't run nobody will play your masterpiece of storytelling.

Anybody who is willing to forgive bad, boring gameplay because "the story was soooo gooood" is a dolt, least of all because the first person to summarize it on TV Tropes or Wikipedia will obviate the need to actually play the game.

Games do remarkably well without much in the way of story: for example Doom, Minecraft, Angry Birds, Bejeweled, and Sim City. There are good games that have excellent stories, but the only reason we care about them is because they were paired with equally compelling gameplay.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with you. How do you define gameplay?

By personal experience, I was never able to finish games like Quake and Doom because I found them incredibly boring. The first FPS I finished was Deus Ex, which featured a storyline the likes of which I haven't encountered since.

What's more, I played the game at least five times, and haven't yet tired of it. I've discovered new elements nearly everytime - like a passage from a book lying around - that neatly ties into the theme of the game. The ambient music and the settings - although several years behind the cutting edge now - still makes for an incredible playing experience.

So, Deus Ex had a wonderful story and world, but you could have changed a lot of the items and themes around and still gotten the core gameplay: explore a place, solve puzzles, shoot enemies, navigate areas stealthily. The fact that it had a really solid story behind it and lots of fluff was icing on top--had the gameplay (the combination of movements, game rules, and objectives) been lackluster, you would've stopped playing (probably).

Compare this with games like Tetris, Mario, or even Starcraft: there are people that will wank on and on about how great the stories are, how rich the worlds are, how awesome the symbolism is--but the core act of playing the game is what makes them last for so long.

From the FPS genre, we see that Half-Life and its sequels had pretty flimsy stories (despite being regarded for having such great cinematic experiences for the time); however, their use of tight, solid gameplay (both in combat and in puzzles) are why they're loved so much today. Indeed, the better storytelling in Portal 2 was greatly offset by the more-restrictive gameplay it had compared to its predecessor: Portal was much more free-form in portal placement, and did less to hint what the obvious move was.

Bioshock Infinite was a masterpiece of storytelling, and had a genuinely thought-provoking ending and plot. Yet, the actual gameplay was not crazy far ahead of what we've seen in its contemporaries, and that's why it's probably not going to go down as one of the classics of gaming for this era.

~

The big problem with emphasizing story and narrative over gameplay is that it is very easy and seductive to write a rich game world with lots of symbolism and all the rest--but it's hard to see when you're not good at it, and you end up creating kitsch intellectual garbage. Gameplay, though, is easy to test, harder to create, and is what actually ends up immersing your audience and bringing them into your game.

I myself am making a distinction between game developers and game designers.

Also, I don't think you are making a proper analogy. I'd put DTP dudes, print people and so on as analogous to game developers, and writer as game designer. And it would still be stretching it.

> I myself am making a distinction between game developers and game designers.

How? There are rather few engine guys outside of Big Developers these days. I haven't read about 3/4 of that list but I've been perfectly capable of slamming together a cross-platform engine that completely meets my needs, using OpenGL/GL ES and OpenAL. Most of the people likely to read this sort of thing are going to be looking at the indie side of things where you wear all the hats.

And specialization is still kind of shitty even in the large. You don't want your programmers knowing how the things players really care about work?